NEWS STORIES IN THIS ISSUE:
STUDY SHOWS HEART VALVE DYSFUNCTION AND ITS TREATMENT MAY DIFFER BY RACE AND ETHNICITY
Heart surgery has a history of racial inequities regarding diagnosis, treatment and outcomes. To determine if inequities exist for one of the more common cardiac procedures — heart valve replacement — Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers looked at who in Maryland received diagnoses of faulty valves over a two-year period and then had them replaced.
In their study published July 15, 2021, in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the researchers found that for aortic stenosis — when the aortic valve stiffens and becomes less functional — hospitalized Black patients were diagnosed at half the rate and Hispanic patients at a quarter of the rate of white patients with the condition. Among all patients with aortic stenosis, fewer Black patients had curative…
